3 The Birth of the Left Fraction of the PCI The Left Fraction of the PCI was really born after the split of July 1927, which saw the departure of the minority oriented towards the positions of the German Left. As yet, the Fraction had no press in which to develop its positions. Nor did it have an official existence as an organisation. Chased out of the PCI, its militants were exiled in France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland and as far away as the USA and Russia. Unable to engage in any activity in Italy after the laws of exception passed by Mussolini in 1926, they were thus dispersed to the most far-off countries. This difficult situation did not break their will. Considering themselves members of a single international body, the workers’ International, they were not demoralised by exile. On the contrary, they were to extract new riches from the political life of the countries in which they found themselves. Although they followed the Italian situation attentively, they naturally took part in the political confrontations which were beginning to develop with Trotsky’s expulsion from the International and the birth of opposition groups in the Comintern. The Italian workers’ condition as ‘emigrants’ was taken on proudly by the Left; this was shown by Bordiga’s inter- vention at the 6th Enlarged Executive of the Comintern in 1926, when he compared the Italians to the chosen people, the Jews: To a certain extent, we play an international role because the Italian people is a people of emigrants, in the economic and social meaning of the word, and after the advent of fascism, in the political sense as well… it’s ‘rather like the Hebrews: if we’ve been beaten in Italy, we can console ourselves by thinking that the Hebrews also are not strong in Palestine but outside it. In order to survive, the militants of the ‘External’ Italian Left, as they called themselves, had to organise themselves to carry on a political work that had been completely decapitated in Italy. They had set themselves up mainly in France and Belgium. During the war these two countries had seen their youth sacrificed to the world holocaust, returning mutilated and in much diminished numbers. The French and Belgium governments called for Italian manpower, which had already been present on their soil since the end of the 19th century and which was known to be extremely adaptable. The Italian workers provided the Belgian and French capitalist with an underpaid and skilled labour force in the main sectors of the economy (metallurgy, mining, building). The militants: working class immigrants The overwhelming majority of the Italian Fraction was composed of workers. This should not surprise us. Under Bordiga’s leadership the Communist Party had attracted a whole generation of young workers galvanised by the Russian revolution and the revolutionary movements in Italy after the war. They had been formed in this revolutionary struggle and had not gone through the demoralisation of an inglorious defeat. On the contrary, they had ardently resisted the offensive of the Italian bourgeoisie grouped behind Mussolini, often with guns in their hands. Ideologically they had remained loyal to the intransigent Marxism defended by Bordiga. Even when the latter was deprived of his positions in the leading organs, the working class ‘base’ of the party remained faithful to him. Few of them had followed the Gramsci-Togliatti leadership which the Comintern had placed in an authoritarian manner at the head of the Italian Party. In France itself, in 1926, several thousand Italian communists inside the ‘cells’ remained faithful to the positions of the Italian Left. Trained in a great revolutionary tradition, educated by the struggle, nourished by the theoretical rigour of Bordiga, these Italian workers imposed themselves on the revolutionary milieu through the breath of their political culture. With their rigorous judgement they could cut through the general confusion which had developed in the French oppositional milieu in particular. In France, where the political and theoretical traditions of the communist movement were very weak, their voice remained isolated for a long time, up until the war. In Belgium, on the other hand, as we shall see, the voice of these revo- lutionary Italian workers had more success in making itself heard within the opposition which had developed on the basis of antiparliamentarianism and in contact with the Dutch Left. It would be a waste of time trying to name all the members of the Fraction. Not because there were 50 many of them (never more than 100 after 1926): the initial 1,000 in the emigration was considerably reduced in a matter of months. But above all because the Italian Left always refused to personalise its political life. From Bordiga they had learned that its members had to be anonymous and only existed in the collectivity of the party, which went beyond individualities and personalities. What came first was the organisation, and the Fraction always expressed itself not through individuals but through its organs (executive committee, federations, etc.). Nevertheless, the creation of central organs, and above all the tendency struggles that took place within the Fraction, pushed some militants to the fore. Enrico Russo (known as Candiani), a mechanic from Naples, who fled Italy in 1926; Piero Corradi (Piero), an engineering worker then a taxi-driver living in France; Otello Ricceri (Piccino), a jewellery worker from Florence who emigrated in 1925; Bruno Bibbi (Alfredo Bianco), who had taken part in the Communist ‘action squads’ against the fascists and had arrived in France in 1922; Ferdinando Borsacchi (Pieri or Rintintin), a car worker born in Florence; Bruno Zecchini (il Biondo), born in Venice and a member of the PCI’s ‘defence squad’ in Milan, escaping from the Lipari islands in 1931 to reach France. In 1927 all these militants were barely 25 years old; nearly all were young workers who had joined the PCI very young, very often at the Livorno Congress; they already had a long militant experience behind them, having been tempered by fascist repression and the struggle against the right in the party. These names of young workers, chosen from among others, reflect the common history of the members of the Fraction, of the ‘average’ militant so to speak — if such a term can be applied to this organisation, where everyone was an active militant, very often until they died. Other militants, intellectuals’ by profession rather than workers, were in the front ranks of the Italian Fraction. They were less young (over 30 and sometimes 40) and some had already been members of the PSI before the war. They had a long history as militants, often having been members of the PCI. Ersilio Ambrogi (Massimo), whom we will hear of again, represented the Left in the right wing central committee elected in 1926; a lawyer by profession, he had to go into exile for many years, in Russia, Germany, then again in Russia, from where he remained in contact with the Fraction. Virgilio Verdaro (Gatto Mammone) was over forty in 1927, when he found himself with Ambrogi in Russia. He left there for France in 1931. A member of the PSI since 1901, a history teacher at the lyceum in Florence, he had always been part of the Left; in 1920, with Bordiga and Giovanni Boero, he had been secretary of the Executive Commission of the Abstentionist Fraction. Both of them remained in touch with Italian and Russian realities, and held responsible positions in the organisation. Two militants, who were not wage-labourers, were also linch-pins of the organisation. Giovanni Tornielli (Nero) was a businessman in Vincennes; a former provincial councillor in Turin, he was the organisation’s treasurer. Mario De Leone, born in Naples, had been close to Bordiga in the 20’s; exiled to France he set himself up as a grocer in Annemasse close to the Swiss border (Geneva), from where he would be the representative of a minority which arose during the events in Spain, resulting in a serious crisis in the Fraction. Some of these militants met tragic ends. This was the case with Fausto Atti, a party member since Livorno, and who had emigrated to Brussels. He was one of the founders of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) in 1943, and for this was assassinated by Togliatti’s Stalinists in Bologna. Others, who had been part of the Fraction until its dissolution in 1945, when the new party emerged, did not suffer such a tragic fate, and also played a leading role: Aldo Lecci (Mario Marini or Tullio), Giovannni Bottaioli (Butta), Stefanini. Ottorino Perrone The best-known representative of the Fraction was undoubtedly Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi), so much so that their political enemies called the members of Prometeo and Bilan ‘Perronists’. Born in 1897 in Aquila, he did his military service in the artillery during the war. In 1920, he joined the PSI; he was nominated secretary of the Camera del lavoro in Venice. In 1922, given the job of organising in Padua, he became the editor of the Trieste communist paper Il Lavatore. In 1923, he was given the task of reorganising the Federation of Venice and Aquila. He supported Bordiga at the Rome Congress. Known for his talents as an organiser, he prepared the PCI’s clandestine conference in Como in May 1924. The police, having learned about his role, put him under house arrest in Aquila. This did not stop him going, with Bordiga, to the 5th Congress of the Comintern in June of that year. He was arrested at the Swiss frontier on returning from Russia, and again transferred to Aquila.